Wade was running across the pastures and Lorna was chasing him. Grasshoppers flicked against her bare calves as he got farther and farther ahead, a butterfly of sweat between his shoulder blades, passing the red tractor and two barn cats dozing in a lozenge of sunlight, before disappearing into the dark mouth of the stables.
He’s asking for you, his friend Paul told her when he telephoned to say Wade was in the hospital. Can you come out to see him?
Wade had never before asked her to visit him in San Francisco, though he’d been living there for years. Lorna hadn’t seen him since he was seventeen, when he ran away from school to hitchhike across the country. He sent postcards once or twice a year, the touristy kind. They spoke on the phone at Christmas and on their birthdays, brief conversations, friendly enough. He hadn’t returned for their grandmother’s and father’s funerals.
Yes, she told Paul. I can come.
She’d just gotten her job at the VA; she had a large caseload and no vacation time, and no extra money. There was also the fear of Wade’s disease. Not much was known about it back then except that it was deadly and contagious, and she was afraid, as so many people had been afraid, that you could catch it just by shaking someone’s hand or sitting next to him on the bus. But she asked Faye, her supervisor, for the rest of the week off, and on a frigid March morning two days after Paul called her she flew to San Francisco.
It had been very bright in Wade’s corner room when she arrived at the hospital, late afternoon light blazing through the three windows. Then there was Wade, propped up by pillows in bed, one arm raised like a conductor holding a baton. As he caught sight of her in the doorway, he cried out, LaLa!
Come in! he cried, a tube dangling from one wrist.
Several people were standing around the bed, scrubbed youthful-looking men, clean-shaven or with neatly trimmed beards, dressed in pressed T-shirts and khaki pants or pressed blue jeans with penny loafers. They greeted her cordially and made her sit in the only chair in the room, introducing themselves and asking about her flight. But as soon as she was settled, they turned their attention back to Wade who, after his first enthusiasm at her arrival, had been watching this process impatiently. He raised his arm again. She had interrupted him mid-performance; he’d been describing last night’s dinner. A routine she knew well: the magnificent complaint.
The chicken Kiev had required a panzer division to attack, the green beans were puce; the rice pudding defied analysis without going into highly scientific detail, most of it classified and involving whale sputum and gorilla semen.…
The air in his room was very warm and carried the sting of rubbing alcohol, and beneath it a spoiled sweetish smell, like overripe apricots. Whenever Wade paused for breath, one of the men by the bed offered him a cup of ice chips, but Wade would wave him away and keep talking. On his face were the purplish marks she’d known to expect. His chin was covered with dark stubble, his thin neck too exposed, rising nakedly from the collar of his hospital gown.
Soon another friend arrived, Paul, who had telephoned her. Paul was short and stocky, with an auburn handlebar mustache that was waxed at the tips, and he wore a leather vest. Almost immediately, he began asking brisk questions about which doctor had been in and whether Wade had been given a sponge bath and if the nurse had brought him a specific medication. Wade fell silent and put a trembly hand to his eyes.
Paul went back out into the corridor and returned a few minutes later with a nurse wearing a mask, a plastic face shield, and gloves. The nurse checked Wade’s pulse and gave him a pill to swallow, along with a paper cup of water and a straw. Wade had just started an experimental treatment, Paul explained to Lorna after the nurse left and Wade was sipping his water through the straw. The treatment seemed to be working; he’d had more energy in the last couple days.
I’m General Electric, said Wade. He put the cup down on the metal table by his bed. Give me a salute. Everyone saluted. Then he was off again, this time describing his “fellow inmates” who shuffled past his door in their loose hospital johnnies, which were designed to be as ugly as possible so that you wouldn’t mind if you died. Why not just issue everyone a black robe? There was something so elegant about Grim Reaper outfits, they had a nice drape, and the hood did wonders for anyone with a bad complexion. Everyone laughed.
It was becoming clear to Lorna that Wade’s visitors were used to his performances and depended on him to keep them up, and also that Wade understood this. They all wore the same expression as they listened to him, like tired people sitting by a fan.
Your brother is a remarkable guy, said Paul in a low voice. He had come to stand beside Lorna’s chair, gazing down at her over his mustache. Wade gave her a sharp look from across the room, as if only just then noticing she was there.
Sister here, he said a moment later, has just reminded me of the strangest old things. Did you know we grew up on a plantation?
He began describing the farmhouse, referring to it as “a decayed antebellum manse.” In the den had been a row of false-backed books, concealing a hidey-hole where their father—“the Old Gent”—stashed jars of moonshine, but it had once contained the petrified arm of a Yankee soldier, presented to their grandmother by an admirer on the eve of her first cotillion. Above the fireplace hung a cavalry saber used to behead a Confederate traitor. Slaves were buried in the family graveyard. The cellar was crawling with rattlesnakes. Sister, he kept calling Lorna, in a drawling voice, as if they were characters in a Tennessee Williams play. Sister knows what I’m talking about. He gave lengthy descriptions of the stable hands, as dumb as roosters, but just as cocky, haha! We lived on a stud farm, Wade kept insisting.
The really strange thing was that much of what he said was true, or true in a sense (there had once been a rattlesnake in the cellar, stud fees helped support the stable), or could have been true (though not the petrified arm), but presented in such a way as to be cartoonish or ghoulish or outlandish, and nothing like anything Lorna remembered.
Occasionally the phone by his bed rang, answered by Paul in a hushed voice while Wade kept talking. The window beside her chair overlooked a small brick courtyard several stories below, which held a pair of squat palm trees and a stone fountain. Lorna watched the fountain as, one by one, Wade’s friends left and were replaced by other friends, except for Paul, who stayed perched on the end of Wade’s bed whenever he wasn’t answering the phone. Around five thirty, almost mid-sentence, Wade fell asleep for a few minutes while everyone in the room kept quiet.
But just as Paul put a finger to his lips, Wade opened his eyes and said, Well, that’s all for this evening, ladies.
The two friends who were there leaned over his bed, clasped his shoulder, and wished Wade a good night, sounding regretful about leaving, yet looking relieved; his stories had been draining in their determined outrageousness, and the room was close and depressing, as hospital rooms invariably are, even ones with three windows. Paul ushered them into the corridor, but stayed behind himself. Lorna took the elevator with the two men who’d left with her. In the lobby she declined their kindly, half-hearted dinner invitations and instead walked across the street to a Mexican restaurant, where she went into the little blue-tiled bathroom near the entrance and carefully washed her hands.
After dinner she walked to her bed-and-breakfast on Divisadero Street and sat in a parlor with grayish lace curtains and quaking glass lampshades while the proprietor, a handsome old man with long dyed-blond hair, explained what could not be flushed down the toilet and when breakfast was served, and then she went up to her room on the third floor and sat looking out at the glittering hills of the city.
Paul had asked her not to visit Wade in the mornings, but to wait until midafternoon. Wade was sleeping until then, Paul explained, or groggy from the medications he was taking. At first Lorna thought that Paul wanted time with Wade to himself. But then she understood that Wade was conserving his energy for that rotating group of friends who began appearing every day around three or four.
She spent each morning walking. It was foggy until nine or ten, and then the fog would lift and from the tops of the hills she would get a view of the city, laid out like a map, and the agate-colored bay. She recognized sights from postcards Wade had sent over the years. Golden Gate Bridge. Fisherman’s Wharf. Out in the bay was Alcatraz, the military prison, swimming distance from shore, yet reportedly surrounded by sharks. As she walked she kept trying to glimpse Wade at seventeen, arriving alone in San Francisco after hitchhiking across the country—surely not in his cadet uniform, though that’s how she pictured him, in gold braid and epaulets, climbing these same streets to get his bearings, saluting Alcatraz in honor of his own escape, still with that fold of baby fat under his chin, but also with something shrewd, even a little calculating about his youth. Not unaware of the sharks.
At the steepest crests, the houses on street corners seemed to hang in the air, while the wind blew brightly and sunlight skated along the cable car tracks. One thing she noticed everywhere was the smell of tar and of something burning, like the smell of burnt toast.
Brimstone, said Wade cheerfully, when on her second day in San Francisco she asked about that smell. The Hills Brothers coffee factory, corrected Paul, with a pitying smile, as if to say, How much you don’t know. Sister.
ON HER FOURTH EVENING in San Francisco, her last, Lorna did not leave with Wade’s friends, but stayed in the chair by the window. She had a red-eye back to Boston and had brought her suitcase with her so that she could go straight from the hospital to the airport. After a few minutes even Paul left, reluctantly, to pick up some dry cleaning, he said, and to feed his neighbor’s dog, perhaps realizing he should give them some time alone. Lorna hadn’t liked Paul, with his officious mustache and his leather vest that looked like it should have a sheriff’s badge pinned to it. Yet she was grateful to him for taking care of Wade and as he left that evening she found herself wishing he would stay.
Wade seemed unusually subdued and didn’t look like he was listening when she tried to tell him about her job at the VA. Someone had shaved him, probably Paul, and except for those purple marks his face was white and gaunt, and too bare. Nurses, shielded like beekeepers, came and went, adjusting monitors, changing the bag on his IV pole, looking away from him as much as possible. The overripe apricot smell, which had come and gone over the past few days, was stronger now.
At some point, a nurse came in with his dinner tray. When she began to draw the window shades, he told her to leave them open, but asked her to turn off the overhead light. After the nurse left, Lorna said she should go soon, to get some dinner before she caught her plane.
Eat mine, he said. She ate the package of crackers that had come with his soup. The window by his bed filled with twilight. In the cool San Francisco evening outside, the streets must have been full of people heading home or out to restaurants for dinner or a glass of wine. Spotlights came on in the courtyard around the palm trees and the fountain, enough light to filter in from the window and illuminate Wade’s face and hospital gown.
Still he didn’t speak. Lorna was afraid he had noticed how she’d stayed in that chair for the past three days, looking out the window, and hadn’t touched his shoulder or held his hand, as his friends did when they said goodbye.
She had to be at the airport by eight and it was nearly six thirty. This was their last chance to talk about why Wade had wanted to see her, but she couldn’t figure out how to begin. So she asked about Paul, if it was “serious” between them, and Wade shrugged and said something about feeding the dog. Then he went silent again. In that dusky light, the blotches on his face weren’t so visible, and he seemed very young, lying against his pillows, like a boy tucked into bed. He reached for a paper cup on the metal table beside him. When he put the paper cup back down, it made an empty sound.
Know what I did? he said.
No, Lorna said, grateful that he was speaking at last. What did you do?
Sat on the landing and listened.
She pressed the empty oyster cracker package between her fingers so that the plastic crackled. Listened to what?
You remember. His voice had gone reedy. I sat outside your room and listened to those stories she told you.
I’m sorry, she said, heart beating faster, but I don’t remember any of that.
He gazed at a point over her head with an abstracted expression, gave a hard cough, and touched his mouth with the edge of the blanket. Then he asked what she did remember. Tell me, he said. Tell me about us, when we were kids.
She thought for a few moments, and then said she remembered how sometimes he would hide under her bed at night and make ghost noises after the lights were out to scare her. And how they used to slip their father’s medals out of the glass case on the mantel and pin them on their shirts. Sir, you are the only one who can lead this mission. All right, Corporal, follow me.
Then they’d run down to the stables, sleepy in the late afternoon, thick with the musty sweet smell of hay, horses moving their hooves deliberately in their stalls, and how they would stop at the wheelbarrow to slide oats through their fingers, chaff rising like gold dust, pretending to be Midas with his treasure while they sneezed.
Something jangled in the corridor. In ten minutes Lorna needed to be downstairs in the hospital lobby. Her plane was leaving in a little over an hour. She was worrying about how long it might take to find a cab, and whether she could ask someone at the front desk to call one for her.
What else, Wade asked, fingers fluttering on top of his chest.
Grasping the handle of her suitcase, she stood up and came to stand at the end of his bed. Remember picking watercress by the springhouse door? Remember sitting under the boxwoods in the snow? How Granny cut their hair with poultry scissors and Lorna told everyone at school that she used a butcher’s knife. How they’d called the furnace Old Scary, sprawling with pipe tentacles down in the cellar.
Wade had turned his face toward the window beside him, picking at the blanket with his thin fingers. He whispered something. When Lorna leaned closer, he said it again:
Remember that time when I ran down to the cellar, and she came after me with a hairbrush?
No, Lorna said, drawing back.
He turned from the window to look at her. I took something from her room. Remember? Thought she was going to break my head open.
Lorna squeezed the handle of her suitcase. I don’t remember.
Busted my lip. Gave me a black eye.
I don’t remember that.
She hated me, he said.
Wade, Lorna said. Don’t.
It had been the humane thing to do, she told herself later, cutting him off like that. What she’d meant was, Focus on your health. Focus on your friends. Stop chasing after her.
But she knew. She understood that it had shaped Wade’s whole life, his belief that he’d driven his mother away with his ardent pursuit of her, sneaking and prying, hunting in her dresser drawers. A pursuit that, for whatever reason, Marika had viewed as an attack, requiring her to attack him back. Lorna could have said: She was probably projecting when she beat you with that hairbrush. She could have diagnosed Marika with behaviors she wrote on charts at the VA. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder. Schizoaffective disorder. But would that have made any difference? Wouldn’t it just have made Marika the center of attention, once again, when Wade deserved all that attention himself?
Paul was right, Wade was remarkable. Battling on gallantly, despite his horrifying disease, with his marvelous complaints, his outlandish stories, his jaunty embrace of brimstone. Every afternoon in his hospital room taking the lead, showing how it could be done: It’s an outrage what is happening, so be outrageous. I’ll lead this mission. Follow me, corporals. Because he knew, and his friends standing around his bed knew, that what was happening to him could soon happen to them.
This is how to lose your treasure, by sneezing at it.
On that cool March evening in San Francisco, their last time together, in his darkened hospital room overlooking a fountain, what she should have done was let Wade talk. But she could not bear to listen. And so out of pity and cowardice and delicacy and dread, she’d changed the subject.
She said she was glad the new treatment he was on seemed to be working, that he sounded a lot better, that his voice was a lot stronger. She said that Paul seemed like a nice guy, and how lucky Wade was to have such good friends who cared about him. She said she would come back to visit soon. Wade had turned his face back to the window. When it was clear he was not going to look at her again, Lorna said goodbye stepped into the bright corridor, squinting at the lights, suitcase bumping against her legs.
There was a memorial service in San Francisco, held at the library where Wade had worked, and almost three hundred people came, from all over the city. He’d become something of a local celebrity because of the programs he’d created for children, especially for ones in foster homes and shelters. Paul wrote to her later and sent her the obituary that ran in the paper. She’d saved the obituary for years, and then lost track of it. But one phrase came back to her now: “An irreplaceable presence.”
The mist had thickened, become grayer, more clammy and obliterating. Lorna pressed her back against the tree trunk to feel its rough bark through the thin fabric of her blouse, and wrapped her arms around herself.